Page 71 of The Drifter

The table in the middle of it was the size of a boat. Long, dark, ringed in chairs, with screens gone dark on the walls and maps in drawers I could smell. The whole room was wired and clean and quiet the way certain rooms in certain buildings are quiet—rooms where the talking matters. A war room. A real one. I'd sat in its cousins on other continents, under other flags.

The seven of us took one end of the table. Six brothers, and my father in the middle, and every face turned to him.

It was Wyatt who broke it. He tipped his chair back and looked at the old man sideways.

"You getting tired of telling this tale yet?"

"No." My father shook his head slow. His eyes hadn't left me since the courtyard, not for more than a few seconds at a stretch, the way you keep checking a fire. "It's part of the job."

Then, he turned all the way to me, and he folded his hands on the table, and he told me.

"It starts with work," he said. "Before you were born. Before your mother. I was a soldier, and then, I was something after a soldier, the kind of thing that doesn't get a name or a discharge. And the outfit I ended up inside of ran a program." He said the next two words carefully, laying them down like they were heavy. "Project Trueborn."

The room was still. My brothers had heard this. I watched them not-listen the way men not-listen to a briefing they could give themselves—but nobody looked away, either. It mattered every time.

"The government wanted better soldiers, and they got tired of waiting for training to make them. So, they decided to breed them." He let that sit. He didn't dress it up and he didn't flinch from it. "Select the fathers. Select the mothers. Engineer the match, guide it, and raise the results in conditions built to produce a certain kind of man. Strong. Fast-thinking. Cool under fire. They tried it their way and I came up with a better one." His eyes moved to Cash, half a second, and came back. "It wasn't a theory. It worked. You're sitting at a table full of the proof."

The floor moved under me. Slow, the way big things move.

"The program belonged to something called Department 77," he said. "I was theirs. Your mother—" and here, his voice changed, roughened, and he didn't fight it, "—your mother was theirs, too, though she knew even less than I did about what that meant. They put us together like you'd pair horses. And then, you boys started coming, and here is the part I need you to hear, Clint, because it's the only part that matters."

He leaned in.

"What they engineered was the match. Nobody engineered the rest of it. I loved your mother. God as my witness, I love her now. And there is nothing in a lab or a file anywhere on this earth that had one thing to do with what I feel for the seven of you."

Seven. I caught it, and filed it, and it would matter in about four minutes.

"Then why'd you leave?" I asked. My voice came out level. It surprised me.

"Because they were done letting me be a rancher." He said it flat. "The program was ending—officially. Unofficially, Department 77 didn’t end things, it buried them, used them, and it was starting to look at the evidence. The evidence was a ranch in Jeff Davis County with seven boys on it." His jaw set, and for a second, I saw the man from the end of the road, the one whose walk I'd hunted on two thousand highways. "They were going to take all of you. And I couldn’t let that happen. I walked down that road and I didn’t look back, because if I'd looked back, I'd have stopped, and if I'd stopped, they'd have come. And I started a war, a war that kept them from you."

The room held still.

All those years, I'd carried one morning. A man walking away and a boy who concluded, with a boy's arithmetic, that he hadn't been worth staying for. I'd built a whole life on that math. Every road I ever walked was that math. And the math had been wrong—not off by a little, wrong at the root, inverted. He hadn't walked away from us.

He'd drawn fire.

"I spent the years after that inside their machine," he went on. "And I learned it. Every pipe of it, every account, every buried line. And when I understood how much money moved through that darkness with nobody honest watching it, I started moving some of it myself. Slow. Careful. Years of it." Something came into his face then that was pure Tommy, a flash of it, wolfish. "Billions, by the end. Their own money. I took it out of the dark and I built this with it—Dominion Hall, the company, all of it—and I built it for one purpose before any other purpose. To have something to protect my sons. All of my sons."

And there it was.

He said it the way he'd said everything else—careful, weighted, watching me. But the last three words had a different load in them. All of my sons. The sentence had a door in it, and he'd opened the door on purpose, and he was standing beside it, waiting to see if I'd walk through.

"Here we go," Tommy said, to the ceiling, rolling his eyes.

I looked around the table. My brothers had gone carefully neutral in five slightly different ways, which is its own kind of tell.

"All your sons," I said.

"Your mother was not the only woman in Project Trueborn," my father said. "There were others. There was a woman here, in Charleston." A breath. "And a woman in Montana."

The room did its slow-moving thing again.

"So, I have more brothers?"

Nods. All around the table. Even Max, sitting by the door, chose that moment to shift his feet, which read as a nod.

"Where are they?"